City Cloud - European Expansion Assured For Leading IaaS City Cloud

“Building and operating data centres to consistently high standards in multiple locations is far from easy, but Interxion does it very well indeed,” says Johan Christenson, CEO of City Network. “What’s more, it doesn’t muddy the waters by offering connectivity or infrastructure services itself.” Interxion’s neutrality and its focus on quality were deciding factors when City Network was selecting European colocation facilities for its City Cloud nodes.

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The Challenge

City Network’s portfolio of hosting, infrastructure and associated services are relied on by customers ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Its cloud service, City Cloud, is one of Europe’s leading IaaS offerings.

Many customers build their entire infrastructure in City Cloud, reducing the management burden associated with dedicated hardware and benefiting from speed — a virtual server can be created in 30 seconds, easy scalability, and a high degree of automation.

Other customers use it as a rapidly available, cost-effective extension of their existing infrastructure, paying by the hour for allocated resources. For example, a customer can scale up capacity to support peaks in massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) player volumes, or to provide the extremely high levels of computing power needed for several hours of 3D animation rendering — and scale back down when the extra capacity is no longer needed.

Interxion’s broad European footprint supports our expansion plans and was among the key reasons for choosing them as our colocation partner. Ultimately, we expect to have a City Cloud node at every Interxion campus.

Johan ChristensonCEO, City Network

The Solution

City Cloud customers always know where their data is — a critical aspect of meeting regulatory or corporate requirements on data residency. When a customer sets up a new server using the City Cloud web interface, they specify where that server is hosted, and that’s where it — and the data it holds — will stay. That’s why City Network locates City Cloud nodes in many locations, including Interxion’s London and Stockholm facilities. “Interxion’s broad European footprint supports our expansion plans and was among the key reasons for choosing them as our colocation partner,” explains Johan Christenson, City Network’s CEO. “Ultimately, we expect to have a City Cloud node at every Interxion campus, including Frankfurt and Amsterdam.”

“Because Interxion has the same accreditations as us, we know that data security processes are airtight,” says Christenson. “Working to a common set of standards makes these processes easier for our customers to understand.”

Colocating at Interxion lets City Cloud offer hybrid cloud solutions by moving customers’ legacy physical servers to Interxion and directly connecting them to the City Cloud infrastructure. This capability enabled a UK customer to close its data centre before its migration to City Cloud was complete, and colocate its handful of remaining racks at the Interxion London campus.

“Combining cloud with a customer’s hardware in this way is simply not possible with big public cloud providers, but it’s a valuable option for customers who want to phase their transition to the cloud,” says Christenson. “It’s a USP for City Cloud, that’s enabled by Interxion and delivered under the City Cloud brand.”

With plans to extend City Cloud into multiple Interxion locations, Christenson doesn’t underestimate the role of Interxion’s carrier-neutrality: “We get the broad choice of connectivity options we need to build the very best City Cloud services, create customers’ private networks, and link City Cloud nodes across data centres.”

City Network also values Interxion’s cloudneutrality: “Because Interxion doesn’t offer cloud or hosting services that compete with ours, there are no grey areas in our working relationship. That means we can discuss new projects with them openly to deliver the best solutions for our customers,” says Christenson.

“All in all, it’s been a smooth ride with Interxion,” confirms Christenson. “Their aim is to build and operate the best possible data centres, and we’re pleased to benefit from that single-minded pursuit of excellence.”

About City Cloud

With over 15,000 customers City Network is one of the leading web hosting companies serving customers all over the world. It hosts everything from basic websites in a shared environment to very large systems of hundreds of servers. Its experts help with redundancy, security, performance as well as getting customers a financially efficient solution. City Network is a registrar for a number of top-level domains. www.citynetworkhosting.com City Cloud is one of the leading cloud computing services (IaaS) in Europe. Customers can create virtual servers in its control panel in under 30 seconds and change the hardware profile to fit their needs. www.citycloud.com